Hammy Goonan

Silhouetted by the sun

Okay 2026, let's go! This photo of a skydiver silhouetted by the sun is truly mind blowing. Fittingly, it won the Astronomy Photographer Of The Year prize. I'm starting a new job in a few weeks as an Engineering Manager and thought this advice about inverting

Weird Al

I said last post that I wasn't going to talk about AI, but Nik Suresh made a guest appearance on Ed Zitron's feed and, as expected, really touched a nerve for me. Oh, and here's a block list for AI which you can add

Ticketek does not work with Firefox and other end of the world scenarios

Ticketek does not work with Firefox. What the actual fuck. 2 hours waiting on line to get a ticket to the footy only to be prevented from checking out. I tried Safari, same deal. Isn't there some sort of equal access provision? Surely we have standards. At least

Portland

It's been a minute. Let's close some tabs. AI bots are the scourge of the internet that threatens to destroy the open nature of the internet itself, as if there weren't enough forces conspiring to do that already. Thankfully Cloudflare has declared war(ish)

The failure of Agile

I've had a rant bouncing around my head for a while about "Agile". In tech it's a given. Every job ad requires 'agile experience' whatever that might mean. But the purpose of agile is lost and has come an almost dogmatic adherence

Adventures in Digital Sovereignty

Andrew Bednarz has started on his journey to Digital Sovereignty and I'm paying close attention. There are a lot of services he mentions there which cut deep - companies I've long had a great deal of trust in that now pose a treat simply because they

Golden Pains

I went to Golden Plains over the March long weekend. It's more or less the only festival I get my aching old bones to any more but it was a particularly special one. Kneecap were awesome, and it really felt like being part of a bit of a

Use Firefox

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) seems to enjoying being highly opinionated in a way that divides an audience. The examples are numerous. I'll pick his decision to drop Typescript support for Turbo to illustrate my point. But he's always been one to keep an eye on because

Tech Talks, Privacy Backdoors and DEI

I attended DDD Melbourne last weekend which was well worth the very reasonable price of entry. It has a pretty unique vibe for these sorts of conferences and there was certainly plenty of energy and had quite an engaging sense of community which is much nicer than some of the

Progressive Enhancement

I can't unsee HTMX. I'm so over React and I'm not the only one. Websites should use progressive enhancement to only add JavaScript interactivity when required. Websites should work with JavaScript disabled. I'm super into Astro at the moment and have smashed

For the Benefit of Earth

The most recent edition of the wonderful 9pm Edict mentions Blue Origin's pretty wild promo video in which they talk about how energy consumption is expanding exponentially which is why we need to colonise new worlds (I'm paraphrasing). I've long said what matters is

HTML Rules!

So I thought I'd try "Siri Intelligence". Started by asking it the result of the last Tottenham game which it managed. Good it's vaguely up to date. Then I asked a follow up question which it couldn't answer. Then I asked about

New year, new me

Nah, not really. Still miles behind and lots of tabs open to tell you about. Fittingly 'Enshittification' has been dubbed Word of the Year in Australia by the Macquarie Dictionary. I've been a big fan of the word, coined by nerd royalty Cory Doctorow (who I

Ask rationally difficult questions

I attended PyCon AU a bit over a week ago. The title of this post is from Linda McIver's (from the Australian Data Science Education Institute) fantastic keynote about the important of understanding data. An interesting counterpoint was Kendra Vant's Keynote on the Sunday about the

Layers

In case you missed it, The Onion has purchased far-right conspiracy website InfoWars previously owned by Alex Jones who is having to liquidate assets after a court ordered him to pay $1.4 billion to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. In these dark days, it&

Model Collapse

It's being reported that OpenAI's next version won't be the big leap forward that previous versions have been. The rate of improvement is declining which readers will know is not a huge shock to me. The effectiveness of these models is directly proportional to

The Voice of God

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice

Opting Out

404 Media recently reported on Udemy providing an "opt-out window" for content creators having their content being used to train an AI model. The argument made is that they would need to retrain their models to remove your content if you opted out at a later date. It&

Fighting maths

The Founder of the encrypted messaging app Session has moved to Switzerland, reportedly, because of Australia's hostility to encryption. It's a pretty disappointing situation where Australian need to start actively choosing apps developer overseas because they are move secure. Apparently the Victorian police went to the

Make the Internet Weird Again

Shall we start with a little AI Shitposting? Seek is now training AI models on user's data, after a minor terms and conditions updates and no ability to opt out. Companies obviously don't give a shit any more as their investors scream at them to do

Disappointments

It's been 12 months since Australia voted against a constitutionally enshrined 'voice' to parliament for First Nations Peoples. It was a sad day in a long tragic history of racism, ongoing genocide and intergenerational trauma for the oldest living culture in the world. Many works have

Superb Fairy Wren

I was riding my bike along a bike path yesterday through a fairly industrial area. The bike path has been under development for at least the past 12 months and linked to the development of a free-way, but I'll take it. They've been planting a bunch

Going nuclear

In "is AI really worth it" news, Microsoft are looking to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to help fuel the AI hype machine. They will spend US$1.6b to refurbish the plant - imagine how many lives you could save much better you could

A Charitable War

The Land Forces expo was met with protesters here in Melbourne last week, and rightly so in my opinion. What was most alarming to me was the police response to the protesters which included stun grenades, "hard foam baton rounds" which the ABC assures me is not, in

Bubbles and Technical Debt

It's reasonable old news now, but the Auditor General is investigating the investment of nearly $1 billion in public money. Thank goodness, the whole thing has always stunk. This is a good time to remind everyone that, which an incredible feat of engineering, Quantum Computing is a bubble